Topics in Open Source Development

This course introduces students to the technological, social, and pragmatic aspects of developing open source software through direct involvement in large open source projects. Students will learn to use the tools, techniques, and strategies of open source developers. This is a project-based programming course.

Course Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course students should be able to:

Discuss the issues and currents in open source and open source development

Describe the history and philosophy of an open source project

Choose between the various open source licenses understanding the implications for users, developers, and the software community in general

Use the communication modes particular to the open source world through participation in such things as GitHub, mailing lists, wikis, etc.

Write software that integrates and interacts with existing open source systems. For example: add-ons; bug fixes; new features; etc.

Work collaboratively with fellow students and members of the open source community.

Major Project

This is a project course, and the majority of each student’s mark will come from work done on a real development project. The primary goal of this project is to get students involved in the open source development community and its codebase. Through this experience students will learn about the processes, tools, and practices involved in developing software as part of a large open source community.

Philosophy

Many of the practices inherent in open source development will seem to go against the structures often set in place for similar course work. For example, students are typically forbidden to collaborate with peers, to copy from the web, etc. However, these rules must be re-evaluated in the context of proper and pragmatic open source development practices.

First, consider the typical rules around cheating and plagiarism. In this assignment, students are encouraged to work within the set of best practices natural to open source development. Open source developers do not write from scratch what already exists and is freely available for use. Students should be thinking in terms of code reuse. It is acceptable for students to use code from other open source projects, so long as the license is amenable to the use.

Second, consider the typical restrictions on peer-collaboration. In this project students are encouraged to work together, to help one another, to look at each other's code, etc. Open source collaboration is about leveraging the collective knowledge of a community to help solve the problems of the individual.

Third, consider the sharp dividing line between student projects in most programming courses. For the most part, students are evaluated on their ability to do a particular project or to solve a particular problem on their own. The outcome is measured against peer outcomes. However, in this course students are not in competition with their peers; rather, they are all working on one large project (e.g., Mozilla) with many sub-projects within it. As a result, there is no clean line to divide one student’s work from another, or even student work from that of the open source community. This means that collaboration between students and even other members of the open source community is acceptable practice.

To summarize, students should:

Help each other, contribute to one another’s projects

Work with and within the open source community

Give others encouragement and credit when they offer help

Use existing open source code whenever possible

Be open to helping others and to being helped

Intellectual Property

Given that this course is focused on open source development, and given that students work on real open source codebases, all student work will become open source. The particular license used will be determined based on the particular project and open source project.

Grading

Detailed grading information will be discussed later in the term. Below is a breakdown of how students will be graded, and this blog post gives more details about the rationale: